Rufus Cutler Dawes was an American civic leader and businessman in oil and banking from a prominent Ohio family.
Background
Rufus C. Dawes was born on July 30, 1867, in Marietta, Ohio, the second son and second of six children of General Rufus R. Dawes and Mary Beman Gates, and a younger brother of Charles Gates Dawes, subsequently vice-president of the United States. Both parents came of old New England stock.
Rufus Cutler Dawes was named for a great-great-grandfather on his father's side, the Reverend Manasseh Cutler, who, with General Rufus Putnam and others, founded the Ohio Land Company, opened up Ohio to settlement, and established the town of Marietta in 1788.
Young Dawes's father, who traced his descent from the William Dawes who, with Paul Revere, carried the message of the approaching British march from Boston to Concord in April 1775, had commanded the 6th Wisconsin Regiment during the Civil War; he later made a fortune as a railroad builder, contractor, and rolling-mill operator. His rolling mill succumbed to the panic of 1873, but he reestablished himself in the wholesale lumber business and served in Congress, 1881 - 1883.
Education
Young Rufus Dawes grew up in Marietta and attended Marietta College, from which he received the degrees of Bachelor of Arts (1886), Master of Arts (1889), and an honorary Doctor of Law degree in 1933.
Career
In 1889, Rufus Dawes entered his father's lumber business. When in 1897 Charles Dawes was named by President McKinley as Comptroller of the Currency, he called his brother Rufus to Chicago to take over management of his gas plants in Evanston, Illinois, and La Crosse, Wisconsin.
Dawes soon became prominent as a public utility executive. In association with his brothers Charles, Beman Gates, and Henry May he incorporated the firm of Dawes Brothers (1902), and this, in turn, organized the Metropolitan Gas and Electric Company and the Union Gas Company, which pioneered in developing natural gas fields and pipelines and established and operated gas and electric companies scattered from Alabama to California. One of the first high-pressure gas mains ever laid carried gas from Waukegan, Illinois, to Evanston, Illinois, for the North Shore Gas Company, one of the Dawes enterprises. Dawes was particularly active in the early development of the Louisiana natural gas fields. In the course of its utilities operations, Dawes Brothers acquired an interest in the Ohio Cities Gas Company, which later developed into the Pure Oil Company. In Dawes Brothers, Charles was the initial promoter and financier, but Henry and particularly Rufus were the managers.
It was under Rufus's direction that Dawes Brothers in 1926 prudently began disposing of its utility holdings, completing the sale in 1929. His discriminating judgment and wide knowledge of world affairs also were of special value when he became chief of the staff of assistants advising his brother Charles and Owen D. Young, as members of the experts committee established by the Reparations Commission in 1922 to study means of restoring the German economy. It was this committee which produced the Dawes Plan, named for Rufus's more famous brother. The story of the mission is told in Rufus Dawes's The Dawes Plan in the Making (1925).
A loyal citizen of his adopted city, Dawes gave his most notable service to Chicago as president of its world's fair of 1933 - 1934, "A Century of Progress. " He was one of its fourteen incorporators in 1928, and his dauntless courage did much to carry the project to successful completion in the face of the calamitous depression. The exposition justified his faith, drawing millions of visitors to Chicago and closing its books with a surplus - reportedly the only world's fair ever to do so.
From 1934 until his death Dawes served as president of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Rufus C. Dawes died on January 8, 1940, of a coronary thrombosis or occlusion at his home in Evanston, Illinois, and was buried in Oak Grove Cemetery in Marietta, the city of his birth.
Achievements
Rufus Cutler Dawes is remembered as public utility magnate and businessman in oil and banking, who in the 1920s served as an expert on the commissions to prepare the Dawes Plan and the Young Plan to manage German reparations to the Allies after World War I. In addition, Dawes attracted most attention as president of a Century of Progress Exposition which drew nearly 40, 000 persons to the lakefront grounds while the city and nation were emerging from the depression.
During World War II, in 1943 the United States Navy commissioned a Liberty Ship, named the SS Rufus C. Dawes in his honor. It was scrapped in 1968.
Rufus C. Dawes served as president of the Commercial Club of Chicago, and from 1934 - 1940, as head of the World's Fair organization and the Museum of Science & Industry (MSI).
Personality
Well tailored and meticulously neat, his eyeglasses attached to a black silk ribbon, Rufus C. Dawes was thoughtful and studious by nature. Dawes read widely and weighed what he read carefully.
Quotes from others about the person
"He is a great man in every way, and only his modesty holds him back. " (Charles G. Dawes)
Connections
On June 3, 1893, Rufus Dawes married Helen Palmer of Washington Court House, Ohio, by whom he had seven children.
Father:
Rufus R. Dawes
Rufus R. Dawes was a military officer in the Union Army during the American Civil War.
Mother:
Mary Beman Dawes (Gates)
Sister:
Mary Frances Beach (Dawes)
Wife:
Helen Dawes (Palmer)
Daughter:
Margaret Jefferson (Dawes)
Daughter:
Palmer Dawes
Daughter:
Jean Palmer Sherman (Dawes)
Daughter:
Helen Watermulder (Dawes)
Son:
Robert Rufus Dawes
Son:
Charles Cutler Dawes
Son:
William Mills Dawes
Brother:
Henry May Dawes
Henry May Dawes was an American businessman and banker from a prominent Ohio family.
Brother:
Charles Gates Dawes
Charles Gates Dawes was an American banker, general, diplomat, and Republican politician who was the 30th vice president of the United States from 1925 to 1929.
Brother:
Beman Gates Dawes
Beman Gates Dawes was an American politician and oil executive, who served two terms as a Republican Congressman from Ohio.
